With monsoon here, Mumbai’s temperature and pollutant ranges are at clean lows, but once more, dreadful flooding, infrastructure collapses, and loss of lives mar the season. And again, Mumbaikars are blaming the government and its corporations for passing the greenback. Nobody wants to address the elephant in the room: steady failure in urban planning.
It’s penny sensible and pounds foolish to suppose that in 12 months, the BMC will continue pumping water into the sea when the larger troubles remain unchallenged. Social media and news coverage have identified several grave happenings inside the town. However, the tedious efforts of the civic authorities stay hidden from the public eye.
Many Mumbaikars are oblivious because the metropolis acquired greater than the month’s common rainfall in just two days. The British-era typhoon water drains, designed for 25-30 mm rain in line with hour, unsurprisingly, could not deal with over 500 mm rain in an afternoon, leaving the BMC to pump out a whopping 14,000 million liters into the ocean. No town in the world could have been organized for this. But sturdy planning allows global towns to successfully cope with herbal screw-ups some distance extra.
Despite witnessing huge losses of lifestyles and assets yearly, Greater Mumbai’s Development Plan 2034 is oblivious to climate change troubles. It could most effectively worsen the state of affairs. Instead of aiming for improvement, DP 2034 casts apart the metropolis’s crying desires for terrible developer-led making plans.
Despite repeated coaxing by stakeholders and civil society organizations to urgently address flooding, augment open spaces, and boom infrastructural capacities, DP 2034 is fixated on maximizing built improvement and amplified concretizing of land. Flood-prone areas identified in the 2015 current land use survey have not been noted in the DP. However, they have instead been exacerbated by reckless built improvement. Climate trade has been loosely tagged on every record; however, not one report seeks energetic guidelines to mitigate its impact.
The DP promotes excessive floor area index (FSI) and significantly diluted development control regulations (DCRs). Foolishly, it lets each rectangular inch be constructed with podiums and basements, releasing builders of the onus to offer open areas, leaving no space for water to percolate.
The state, subverting a 2013 Supreme Court judgment, has removed the want for a Comprehensive Environmental Impact Assessment of big-scale concretization. Meanwhile, BMC’s protected herbal regions have been unfolded for improvement by sincerely doing away with the “now not” from “now not amenable to improvement.”
We cannot ignore advert-hoc constructed development unaccompanied through a commensurate boom in infrastructure and open areas. Urban making plans and DCR want to be looked at via the lens of the Right to Life (Article 21, Constitution of India), aiming for fairness and empowerment of Greater Mumbai’s 12.44 million citizens rather than facilitating earnings for some.
Although the city has fared incredibly nicely this time, thanks to the BMC body of workers’ toiling, next time won’t be as forgiving. If we no longer call for an extra sustainable destiny now, the authorities will hold to erode our town and the lifestyles of future generations.
